From the Lawrence Daily Journal-World for Oct. 8, 1988:

An article today featured the pumpkin patch on the farm of Larry Schaake and his family. Nearly 3,000 people were flocking to the farm each weekend to ride the tractor-pulled hay wagon to the pumpkin patch and spend minutes or hours picking out the perfect jack-o’-lantern gourd. What had begun as a 4-H project a dozen years earlier had grown into not only a pre-Halloween destination for pumpkin carvers, but a fall outing for entire families, with Mrs. Janet Schaake and her daughters wearing orange shirts and the farm’s fuel tanks painted like jack-o’-lanterns. “We kind of think pumpkins all year,” Mrs. Schaake said. “It may be a major enterprise someday.” “Who knows, maybe if it keeps going like this it may be our retirement,” Larry added. Two of the Schaake children, Scott and Sheila, had started growing pumpkins 12 years earlier and had sold them out of the back of a pickup truck. From these humble beginnings, the patch had grown to this year’s pumpkin population of 25,000 to 30,000 in eight varieties.